I'm using the free trial of this software and after a huge spend yesterday I'm second guessing the benefits...
Split tested a few variables and came out with 70+ ads, cool...very easy! But now I've run 70 something ads with minimal optimization and it cost me a ton.
I got some decent insights, like which creatives/ages had slightly better results, but it's almost as if I've set myself up to now pay a ton more upfront with a much bigger optimization timeframe to change very small things.
And it seems like it's probably smarter to just go one step at a time: test 3 creatives on broad audience, see which works better. Then test that winning creative on 3 different age groups...and go from there....
And then I wonder, is THAT amount of manual optimization even necessary? When I get that winning creative is facebook's pixel optimization advanced enough to basically target all of the ages, interest, etc that are performing the best? I imagine it would...
If anyone has insight, let me know! Thank you.
I haven't used adespresso myself but on their blog they even explain it is better for small budgets to only test a single variable at a time.
As for the pixel optimization; yes, FB will optimize this to some extent, however, the algorithm wants to make sure you spent your budget (up to +- 25% of your set budget) and that it is spent gradually throughout the day.
So even while it might optimize for the best age groups, interests, etc, when these users in the audience aren't available (not online), it will start to show your ads too other users outside your ideal segment of the audience. Then later when these users are online, you might have already spent part of your budget to the wrong segment of your audience, and you'll reach less users in your ideal segment.
Thus it might be better to set these constraints explicitly on the campaign, this way the algorithm might not be able to spent your budget evenly, but will leave more budget later on when these users are available..
but yeah, as always with the facebook algo, ymmv